A week long project: garage and closet clutter

I am not at liberty to show you photos of my garage. For that I need permission from my life partner and I can guarantee that until this project is finished, that permission will not be granted.

We have an attached two car garage on the north side of the house. We have never used it for cars and we never will. That isn't the problem. The problem is we've made it a de facto storage unit for pretty much anything large.

But even more importantly, it is the "fitness center" of the house. For a period from spring of 2002 to winter of 2005, I actually lifted weights regularly. Jocelyn even started. We both looked and felt great because of it. (We'll cover even more benefits of a simple weightlifting routine after I get my garage cleaned out.)

The good news is, the clutter in the garage is big. By that I mean, it is large empty boxes, storage crates, and other large items. That means with a little effort, we should be able to conquer the clutter fairly quickly. (Once this is finished, I'm hoping to convince Jocelyn that we should post some before and after photos.)

The motive here is to start the process of emptying this house of its useless and anchoring clutter and to take advantage of a decent home gym set up.

We've been kicking around the idea of moving. The main reason would be to find a larger house. I'm only interested in doing that if we empty this house of every unnecessary thing we can find. I want a larger house only to have more privacy from older, larger children, and to have people over for extended stays (like grandparents, for example) and not have everyone be underfoot.

So, I'm off this week. Job 1, according to Jocelyn, will be to prepare for a family Thanksgiving, followed by decluttering our closet and bedroom. My job 1 will be to get the garage cleaned out and then follow Jocelyn's priorities. We'll see how those things mesh. (We also have to winterize the RV. Don't want the water lines to freeze and have to replace the hot water tank.)

We aren't professional organizers (clearly not) but I'll still post what we've done and what we've learned as we tackle these tasks.

I anticipate feeling much happier once this work is completed.

Do you have a decluttering project looming? What are you going to do about it?

Have you recently completed decluttering? How did you feel afterwards?

Let me know in the comments.